Naimark dilations of qubit POVMs and joint measurements

Abstract

Measurement incompatibility is one of the cornerstones of quantum theory. This phenomenon appears in many forms, of which the concept of non-joint measurability has received considerable attention in the recent years. In order to characterise this non-classical phenomenon, various analytical and numerical methods have been developed. The analytical approaches have mostly concentrated on the qubit case, as well as to scenarios involving sets of measurements with symmetries, such as position and momentum or sets of mutually unbiased bases. The numerical methods can, in principle, decide any finite-dimensional and discrete joint measurability problem, but they naturally have practical limitations in terms of computational power. These methods exclusively start from a given set of measurements and ask whether the set possesses incompatibility. Here, we take a complementary approach by asking which measurements are compatible with a given measurement. It turns out, that this question can be answered in full generality through a minimal Naimark dilation of the given measurement: the set of interest is exactly those measurements that have a block-diagonal representation in such dilation. We demonstrate the use of the technique through various qubit examples, leading to an alternative characterisation of all compatible pairs of binary qubit measurements, which retrieves the celebrated Busch criterion. We further apply the technique to special examples of trinary and continuous qubit measurements.